Evolution to equality

Sometimes, hope close to being extinguished, unlike Langston Hughes wonderful line about a dream drying up like a raisin can actually be realized.

Our newly-elected President has not only evolved as he phrased it a few months ago, but he is serious enough about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens who he equated the Stonewall uprising of 1969 with other Civil Rights of the '60s, and the famous women's convocation at Seneca Falls in the 19th century.

No gay man or woman who lived through the '50s and '60s such as I did, would ever have imagined or dreamed that an American President would make such a significant and inspiring statement about the former outcasts of society.

I'm sure it brought many a lump to constricted throats and more than a few tears to many eyes.

It was a defining moment not only to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, but a recognition that the promise in our Constitution of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" applies to all American citizens.

Suddenly, the years of threats, taunts and in those decades of the '50s and '60s that so many of us were forced to endure was dispelled, canceled and almost forgotten.

For we were accepted as full-fledged American citizens; at last an American President fully understood the inherent principle stated in the Constitution.

Your editorial cartoon on Jan. 24 was touching and revealing that society finally was catching up to those principles, and we're, like the President, slowly evolving.

Here in our beautiful and accepting community we have had a proclamation last June proclaiming the Stonewall uprising, we also have a Stonewall Democratic Club named after that event and a radio show on our local community radio KPFZ 88.1 produced by yours truly.

Perhaps we have all evolved from exclusion to inclusion, from a concept of a closed society to an open one, from bigotry and intolerance to an understanding, from rhetoric to action and most of all, from indifference to compassion.